The Ramsey County sheriff’s office said Wednesday that it no longer will honor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainers without a judge’s order, adopting a policy also in force in Hennepin County.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, detainers are requests for jails to hold individuals up to 48 hours after their local charges have been satisfied.

It had been considered mandatory for jails to honor ICE requests so inmates could be considered for deportation. But recent ICE directives and federal court decisions have made such holds discretionary.

Randy Gustafson, a spokesman for the Ramsey County sheriff, said the jail honors detainers “infrequently” — typically fewer than 10 per year.

“We … no longer participate in this practice,” he said.

He said the sheriff’s office has been working on the issue of ICE detainers for the past few months. They will continue to hold detainees, he said, but only where there is a judicial order or criminal probable cause.

The Ramsey County Jail serves about 21,000 inmates a year, and such detainers affect fewer than 1 percent of them.

Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek and Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced their position Wednesday morning.

ICE places a detainer on roughly 1.5 percent of Hennepin County inmates, the sheriff’s office said.

Stanek said ICE officials would need to obtain the approval of a federal magistrate or judge to detain a jail inmate for more than the mandated 48 hours.

In May, the American Civil Liberties Union sent letters to every county sheriff in Minnesota urging them to abandon detainers, citing the growing number of federal court decisions against the practice.

“Detaining people based on suspected civil immigration violations without probable cause not only wastes scarce local public safety resources and contradicts our sense of fairness — it violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” said Ian Bratlie, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Minnesota.

Ruben Rosario contributed to this report. Raya Zimmerman can be reached at 651-228-5262. Follow her at twitter.com/RayaZimmerman.

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